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With the release of the Windows 7 beta , there has been a lot of speculation about an accompanying version of the Application Compatibility Toolkit . Because the release of a version of ACT so frequently accompanies the release of an OS (or a significant service pack, such as Windows XP SP1), we’ve generated...

Updated March 16, 2009: Somebody updated these links with the 4.0 version (which kind of defeats the purpose of having these links so I’m not sure what they were thinking) but they’re back to the 3.x version now. Hey, there’s a new version of Application Verifier in town, and guess what? Standard User...

The same question came up two times in 26 minutes (on the same discussion list, no less), so I figured I’d answer it once here as that seems a reasonable indicator that others may have the same question. What is the deal with shimming on Windows Vista 64-bit? Well, it turns out it’s a bit of a mixed...

A question came up via comments. (I was going to say that it came up recently, but another glance reveals that it came up in, oh, June. I don’t think I can fairly call that recent…) “…the fix seems only to work if the directory structure exists…” This is true, and worth noting. If you point the fix to...

When you come across issues debugging applications, there are typically several ways to solve them. Today, I'm going to pick on our own stuff and throw a few different shims at it. Interestingly enough, what I'm going to be shimming up will be the tool I use to create shims: Compatibility Administrator...

It seems like just yesterday I was posting about ACT 5.0.2 being released, but we just released ACT 5.0.3 . Now, I've had a couple of people confused about the version numbers we talk about, and what they actually see. For, rather unfortunately, you didn't see 5.0.2 anywhere in the last one, nor will...

If you run the Internet Explorer Compatibility Evaluator on Windows Vista, you get back some data when an ActiveX control tries to write to a file that a standard user used to be able to write to. However, that data doesn't show up when you are using the Internet Explorer Compatibility Test Tool. Why...

Last week, we updated the documentation for the Application Compatibility Toolkit. It's kind of hidden, though - if you go to the Application Compatibility Toolkit download page , you will find a new item in the list of files: ACT50_Doc_Update_Installation_Instructions.zip (1.9 MB) It's got a bit of...

Every now and again, I bump up against a setup application (it's almost always a setup application) that tries to drop older versions of protected operating system files. It's fairly easy to mitigate, but I thought I would go through some of the mechanics, and some of the places where the mitigation...

I received a request to talk about a particular shim. And yes, I received that request over a month ago, so ... sorry about that. Nonetheless, I've managed to scratch out a little niche of time to discuss the shim: OpenDirectoryAcl Yep, this does exactly what you would expect it does, modifying the ACL...

A comment came up on a recent posting regarding modules, inquiring about processes. Specifically: Do these included/excluded modules have to be in the same process, or can they include other processes too? (I have an application that calls multiple child applications that all need to be shimed in the...

I received one comment on my recent blog post on copying from the system shim database, which I think is worthy of discussion as I have heard similar questions before: I have found previously (under Windows XP, haven't attempted under Vista) that some of the built-in shims weren't suitable. I had a custom...

I hear about a bug now and again with Compatibility Administrator [CompatAdmin]. It always surprises me when I hear about the bug, because you can only hit it if you are trying to do something that there is no point in doing (which is why we never caught it before). Here's how you reproduce the bug....

A question came up in the comments of one of my posts, and I think the answer is important enough to elevate to more than just another comment (and I didn't even answer completely in that quick response). When you are configuring a shim and press the "Parameters" button, we've talked about the "Command...

A while back, I write about the Correct File Paths shim . Since that time, I've heard from a number of folks who are using the shim, helping them to configure the command line to fix applications (with the most common explanation being to "quote the pairs" - enclose each redirection pair in quotes, not...

I figured this day would come, and to be honest, I'm a little bit surprised it took as long as it did for me to run into this in the wild. But this week, I finally came across an installer that somebody had devised which would check to see if UAC was turned on, and if so, it would fail out, and not install...

...but I fixed it. And I thought you might like to know how to fix it if you run into the issue. So first, the problem. I was trying to launch IECTT and found this MessageBox: --------------------------- Test Tool Error --------------------------- The file size exceeds the limit allowed and cannot be...

Updated 09-February-2009: Compiled specifically targeting x86, so that you can shim this on x64 builds of Windows.
Updated 18-April-2008 : I did a clean build of this on Visual Studio 2008 before posting, and I forgot about the built-in automatic manifests. These manifests disable some of the shims...

I'm working with a customer on their migration from Windows 2000 to Windows Vista. And, as you might expect, they have built up quite a collection of software that explicitly checks to see if it is running on Windows 2000. Not Windows 2000 or higher, but Windows 2000. So, we're using a lot of Win2000SP3VersionLie...

We have released a new version of the Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.0 . Internally we refer to it as the 5.0.2 release, although the actual version number isn't 5.0.2, it's 5.0.5428.1056. (I still haven't fully grasped all of the inputs that drive the choice of version numbers.) Whatever you decide...

Last time around, we were talking about version lie shims for Windows Vista with managed code. Somebody pointed out that they suspected that the same issue might be true for Visual Basic 6 applications, since version lie shims didn't appear to work there either. Well, this is not entirely true. We can...

One of the classes of shims that people find the easiest to understand are the version lie shims. In essence, we have shims that can compensate for the fact that so many developers' keyboards were shipped with a defective > key (and the failure rate of this key on developer keyboards is astonishing...

In an earlier post , I began having a conversation around how shims work. I wanted to supplement some of the discussion of internals with useful information on how specifically to use shims to address problems which you may discover in the software you are trying to get to work on Windows Vista. In my...

My team, the Windows Application Experience SWAT Team, delivers a two-day training course on the primary compatibility issues we have seen when migrating to Windows Vista, as well as how to use the tools available to manage the process and perform the testing. Well, we shortened the training up a bit...

The release candidate of the Application Compatibility Toolkit is here, and it's good stuff. I've had to resort to sniffing around with a debugger to find many issues with this one, and it's still improving for the final release! I am particularly impressed by what the team has put together for compatibility...